Collaborative data entry

I am not sure if the topic title is right for this question,
but here is the dilemma:

Many apps let users to enter the data:

- school timetable
- wireless hotspots


In 1st case if one student enter his timetable all others should get the same after the app is synchronized with server. Also if one user enter wifi hotspot details all others should get the same. At this point everything is good, data is shared among all users and actually database should grow quickly.

Problem is if one user enters wrong data. all the data is replicated and everybody got wrong data. I know what in the real world and platforms as various forums, wikipedia like sites ,there are moderators which keep track on validity of data.

How about android world? Did you get in this situation with you apps. What are the best principles?


ps: Sry 4my bad English

Interesting subject

For a forum, for example, I as the administrator can set some tests so that the user joining the system can be automatically judged to be 'human' and not some program trying to join just to post spam.

The test is usually a question that the user has to answer 'how many letters in this word' etc. just so that it would be hard for someone to write a script to get around it.

I did this manually to begin with and spent a lot of time deleting bogus 'users' but the simple question 'filter' above has so far been enough to keep the spammers at bay.

Here you can equate 'spammers' with nefarious users who have nothing better to do than to try to destroy your system ... go figure.

Anyway this is part of the same principal, once you have 'trusted' users then there is always the chance that they might accidentally input some bad data, not that they mean to but in the case of your WiFi hotspots for example they might miss out a digit in the coordinates and you have bad data that filters down to everyone... perhaps a system where someone enters a WiFi hotspot and it is published to everyone but there is a 'confirmed' count which goes up as other users confirm that this WiFi hotspot exists?

For the school timetable it might be enough to limit the ability to edit and submit to a few 'trusted' users?

Good subject and quite fascinating!

:wav: